Ari: Do you feel like the President needs to come to Congress? What do you feel like the conversation needs to be? Does the President need to – well, he doesn’t need to – but should he go to Congress for permission, basically?

Ari: What do you think this rush, and the media’s kind of push to war, is all about?

Alan: Well, I think the President inadvertently boxed himself in by using a very vague phrase, in saying that the Syrian Government would be “crossing a red line” if it used chemical weapons. I don’t know what that means. You know, in the world I live in, you can say, “If you do X, I’ll do Y,” but “crossing a red line” is a very vague remark. And now the President apparently feels that based on the evidence he’s heard, which I still maintain is ambiguous, he needs to do something. And that’s one of the failings of modern diplomacy. The world would be a much better place if people were clear about their intentions, rather than saying something like “crossing a red line.”

Alan:Well, I don’t know. To me, a corpse is a corpse. I don’t want to sound flip, but when you’re dead, you’re dead.In this case, the 200 or so people who [are] alleged to have been killed by chemical weapons, on very ambiguous information, those 200 people join the 40,000 who died in the Syrian Civil War last year, the roughly 25,000 who died this year, and the ones who died the year before. That’s a lot of corpses. I don’t really understand exactly why people regard it as being different if you blow up someone with a bomb, versus killing them with gas. Historically, the reason why countries banded together to prevent the use of gas attacks is because, among other things, it ended up being used inadvertently against your own troops. The first widespread use of chemical warfare, in fact the only really widespread use of chemical warfare, was during World War I, almost 100 years ago. And what happened during World War I is, first of all, many of the gas attacks that were used ended up blinding or killing the troops that they were meant to protect, because the wind changed. And secondly, there was a very high level of injury without mortality, which left a lot of soldiers and civilians blind or otherwise permanently impaired. This, at the time, was in some respects worse than being dead. So, historically, that’s why countries banded together [against poison gas]. At this point, the evidence seems to be that there are only four countries in the world that have chemical weapons, and we happen to be one of them. In fact, arguably, the United States has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. So on the basis of that, I’m not sure we’re in the best moral position to be indicating to others what to do about chemical weapons.

Ari: And what about other weapons we have in our stockpile? For example, depleted uranium ammunition?

Ari: Well what is strange to me is the people who seem that think that this decision is easy, “Oh, we’ll just lob some cruise missiles and be done with it.” When in fact the author of that strategy was interviewed by ForeignPolicyMagazine.com today and said that’s not a good strategy for dealing with this — the very author of the strategy.

Alan: Well, right. Some people scratch their heads and wonder why we have to shut down a dozen different embassies through the Middle East, without ever questioning whether there might be some link between that and over a hundred drone attacks in Yemen alone.

Ari: And then you get people like John McCain who are out there saying, “Well, whatever the President does, it’s not enough, we have to do more.” Why can’t we stop – after the debacle that was Iraq? And, look, you have personal experience in that debacle; you prosecuted some of the war profiteers in court. Why do we still listen to these people?